Barry Mazur against Papps -- 15 centuries of error on a Euclid's proposition

Abstract

Barry Mazur published an article some year ago, where he showed, among other things, that the result in the so-called mathematical passage of Plato s Theatetus and Euclid s proposition X.9 in the Elements are very different, while almost all historians and commentators have claimed the opposite. In this lecture, we consider this question to try to understand how and why could have happened such an error, this 'strange delusion' to quote Mazur.